LOVE Yourself First!

As a Recently Divorced Woman, or RDW, I am beginning to do the deep dig and excavate the diamond in the rough. This excavation may continue for a lifetime. Begin with love, add the unknown, and the thrill of freedom, a lot more love, and mix and stir so that some days your life will feel chaotic. Some days it will feel so right, so comfortable, so YOU.

More often than not, the days will be happy and satisfying, you will know you are on a journey. The journey to discover who you are, you will find out how to really love yourself perhaps for the very first time. This is thrilling because for the first time in your life it is yourself who is loving and sustaining you, not another person. You still dream and long for a man to comfort you, to love you the way you are supposed to love yourself, and on a bad day, you fall back into thinking you need this other person to feel loved. But on a good day you KNOW in your heart that this is all on you. You know deep down in the very fabric of your being that you and you alone are the one to love and comfort and take care of yourself. This is your work and no one else on this earth can do this for you.

You may have asked others along the way only to be shunned away. We each are responsible for loving ourselves first before we can ever have any love to give away to someone else. This is the magic in the lesson! It takes a long time to find our way home and one has to travel far in life before they come home to themselves. There is always time. The time is always now. And you are never too late to come to the table of love. That you have arrived is all that matters. That you have become aware of this awesome job that is yours and yours alone to do is the key, the secret, the magic in everything for which you have searched. This is your time. This is your chance. The moment is now. You have all that you need for the trip. Everything resides within you. Sit down on the floor and close your eyes. Soften your face and begin to breathe in gently and fully. Breathe out slowly and completely. Pause at the end of the inhale and at the end of the exhale before riding the wave of the breath back up and back down.

Remember it is a journey so take it slow and enjoy the ride! This exchange of air is changing you, calming you, bringing you awareness and a consciousness you may not have known, or at least you dulled your consciousness to know, until now. Now it is resurging throughout your body, throughout your mind, throughout your very soul and inner being. This consciousness is telling you, you are more…you are more than what you or anyone thinks of you. You are more than what you do for a living, you are more than your looks or your situation. You are love, brought into this world and created from love, a love that is so encompassing our minds have trouble understanding the immensity of it all. It was love all along. And you contain within you all that you need to love yourself completely.

Like a multi-vitamin, you are all of it. Yes it is nice to have a companion to go with you on this journey, but they are just that, someone who is willing to go where you are going, to come along with you, to walk beside you and be your friend. This is who you will express this immense love with, this love which is welling up inside of you. So that the lover, the other, is there to express his or her love to you. You are both just expressing the love that you have cultivated in your own selves out to each other.

It began to make sense to me then that we can only give another love if we have love to give. So that unless we cultivate this love inside ourselves, we will not have anything to give to our lover. And if you go into a love affair, a love relationship, dare I say a marriage, without love for yourself, it is a set-up for disaster on all fronts. We the needy, are left wanting, hoping, and praying that the other will someday fill our cup with love, will love us the way we want to be loved. This is the secret of inner bliss, the secret of happiness. Love yourself, create a love for yourself, within you and all around you and you will exude love, attract love and in a word you will be love. But we must do this work ourselves.

For ourselves, on ourselves and with ourselves. It is always, has always been all within us. We come into this world alone, we learn our way around alone and we will leave this way of life alone, so alone and on our own we go to the greatest adventure ever had to a land called love that exists in this never-ending journey within each of our souls. For we were created out of love for love. Go forth courageously with joy in your heart and love all of YOU!

Reader Interactions

Comments

Married or divorced, maintaining our identity and loving ourselves should be a priority in everyone’s life! Ms. LaPlaca’s mission statement in life seems pretty well defined — cultivate ourselves first, love ourselves first — and all else falls into its rightful place. Loved the article, it’s a great reminder!

Married or divorced, maintaining our identity and loving ourselves should be a priority in everyone’s life! Ms. LaPlaca’s mission statement in life seems pretty well defined — cultivate ourselves first, love ourselves first — and all else falls into its rightful place. Loved the article, it’s a great reminder!

JoAnne, Happiness for me has always been a state of mind depending entirely upon myself.For me, it is rooted in giving. The more I have to give, the happier I become. And the happier I become, the more I have to give. The three gifts in life: faith, hope and love are fundamentals and begin with the self. Your incredible article reminds me once again to honor and cherish me! I do most of the time. But sometimes life throws obstacles that test every aspect of faith, hope and yes love…..Thanks for the great article….I believe in me…..sometimes bad things just happen to good people and life’s curve balls are hard to catch and throw back. Thanks so much for sharing your journey.

JoAnne, Happiness for me has always been a state of mind depending entirely upon myself.For me, it is rooted in giving. The more I have to give, the happier I become. And the happier I become, the more I have to give. The three gifts in life: faith, hope and love are fundamentals and begin with the self. Your incredible article reminds me once again to honor and cherish me! I do most of the time. But sometimes life throws obstacles that test every aspect of faith, hope and yes love…..Thanks for the great article….I believe in me…..sometimes bad things just happen to good people and life’s curve balls are hard to catch and throw back. Thanks so much for sharing your journey.

JoAnne, Happiness for me has always been a state of mind depending entirely upon myself.For me, it is rooted in giving. The more I have to give, the happier I become. And the happier I become, the more I have to give. The three gifts in life: faith, hope and love are fundamentals and begin with the self. Your incredible article reminds me once again to honor and cherish me! I do most of the time. But sometimes life throws obstacles that test every aspect of faith, hope and yes love…..Thanks for the great article….I believe in me…..sometimes bad things just happen to good people and life’s curve balls are hard to catch and throw back. Thanks so much for sharing your journey.

It’s not someone else’s duty to make us feel beautiful or loved or anything else for that matter. We must feel it in ourselves first or else we will never be able to accept it from someone else. We will always be searching for that validation if we don’t know these things within ourselves. I fully agree with everything this article says. It is something I always preach and strongly believe in. I know I’m late on the response because this was posted a year ago, but this is great stuff!

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I’m Jasmine. Editor-in-Chief of Miss Millennia Magazine. We want to make sure you are financially fit, healthy and making excellent life decisions. We are that big sister guiding you through with advice that will get you #adulting like a pro.